Minecraft

[VanAce]

Has anyone played this? The game is still in alpha version and the guy who made it has made so much money from it so far that his PayPal account had to be frozen while they investigated him to see if he was legit.

Its an open world sandbox game kind of game in the first person perspective.

[Lazlow]

Dudes at the forams have been on this for a while, I have no idea what you actually do, all I know is it looks like it could run on my 486.

[VanAce]

I had no idea what to do either. As the tutorial hasn't been built yet I had to look up on YouTube and other guides.

[Zip]

I'd tell you all about it, but I've gotta go back to playing it.

[Silph]

Game is very addictive. Use http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting for crafting help.

[fishfishmonkeyhat]

I hear it's addictive so I'm staying away.

[SOX]

I'm intrigued.

[TrinityJayOne]

It's alright, I mucked around with it a little while ago.

[sausage]

shit graphics so I might give it a miss.

[dinopoke]

Oh man, I started playing this again! It's pretty addictive.

I played back in 2009 when it first started out and it was pretty much a multiplayer building block game. People would make a whole lot of impressive structures but there wasn't really any purpose to the game. This mode is called Classic and is free to play but will slowly be phased out.

Then Survival mode was introduced and it's pretty much what the alpha is right now. Essentially, it's like Dwarf Fortress with one dwarf and in an accessible first-person mode. Essentially you're dumped on a randomly generated world and left to your own devices. You have to have to mine or farm each individual block to build whatever you want. There is also a crafting system to create more items from raw blocks. The place is full of animals to harvest for food to eat, feathers to make arrows and leather to make armor. But why is this important? Because darkness is when the creatures come to attack. At night, the areas is full of zombies, spiders and bow-wielding skeletons. If you don't build a hideout to cower behind at night, you'll probably be eaten alive. Your goal is to survive.

It was an intuitive system. First you would whack a tree with your bare hands to get some wood. You can then craft the wood into logs or further down into sticks and use those pieces to make tools. The crafting system is essentially a grid where you place suitable items in the shape of what you want to craft to create it. You can then use those tools like the pickaxe to mine stone or the shovel to dig more dirt. Each tool has a health bar that depletes on use so you will have to make more or use different blocks to make stronger variations. You'll use these tools to dig out a cave to hide in and build up a barricade to protect yourself at night. You'll make a sword to defend yourself. You'll find coal to make torches. You'll build a furnace to cook meat and smelt metals. You are safe for now. But now what?

Perhaps, you'll become an explorer? Travel the map and see new sights? Look for floating islands, penis shaped monuments or massive waterfalls. Travel lightly and always make a temporary shelter for the night.

Perhaps, you'll build a fortress? Make towers that reach the clouds. Design castles that defy gravity. Create whatever you want provided you collect enough resources. You can even grow some trees and have a farm. Or make a rollercoaster or a water slide.

Perhaps you want to go underground? Keep digging deeper until you find more minerals. Perhaps some gold or diamonds. Maybe an underground river or even some lava. You'll also find more hostile creatures so remember to light up the place with torches. You might even find a dungeon and some loot? Or even create traps yourself for the creatures.

Yeah. You can see I got a bit carried away. They recently had a free weekend so I decided to try it out.I ended up playing for four hours straight. I thought I saw most of the game after that session but then I saw what people were doing on the internet. It's a pretty amazing game and quite addictive. I guess it's not as deep as Dwarf Fortress but it is quite comparable and a whole lot more accessible. Good Game complaining that there was no story was missing the point. This was a game where you create your own stories. The huge dynamic nature of it meant that anything could happen. I mean look at the fire video Blake linked. Look at something amazing like this:

At the moment, Multiplayer is being worked on with most of the features of singleplayer Survival. Damage to players and monsters is only thing notable missing at the moment so when they add that, it will be insane.

TL;DR
I highly recommend you try this out. The creator (Notch) is earning bucketloads at the moment, but if you really like this, you'll probably get it (like I will). It's about $15 I think.

Here's a fan made trailer

and here is a good tutorial to start off.